Daily log - April 15, 2009

ResponseCache on its deathbed? Last night, I started upgrading Radiant to use Rails 2.3.2. Of course, tons of specs in our suite broke, and initially nothing would even run. A large number of the specs that broke were around the ResponseCache class, which handles Radiant’s 5-minute automatic-expiring page cache. Rails 2.3 includes a number of changes that simplify ActionPack, including a rewrite of the request and response classes to use Rack. Thus it seems natural that ResponseCache broke the most. However, I had been looking at Rack::Cache a while back, and it seems it may do most of what we want, provided we return the right headers from page renders (ETag, Last-Modified, and Cache-Control come to mind), and we implement a way to manually expire the cache. This should be good work to do at the Radiant hack day next week.

More cucumber stuff If you start using the new “profiles” feature in cucumber for running your feature stories, and you want to run different modes with the rake task (say, one for bare webrat and one for Selenium), you have to specify both which profile with t.profile = 'foobar' and also clear out the default step files, t.step_files = ''. Otherwise, you’ll get the problem I was having – trying to run both bare Webrat and Selenium (huh?) because the setup files were both required.

Variety is the spice of life As a freelancer, it’s easy to want to fill up every waking moment with something that will either move your projects along or to learn something new. My work had run late today (a bad habit lately and a consequence of working with people in later time zones), so by the time I was ready for dinner I was famished, tired, and frustrated. After eating, my wife Liz encouraged me to read a book instead of messing around on my computer. I’m glad I did – I read about a quarter of The Kite Runner in one sitting and didn’t think about my computer once. Ironically, here I am finishing up my daily log on my computer.

Tax day Did you file your taxes by today? Big thanks to Jeff for doing such a great job on ours. In light of the recent “tempest in a teapot”/“astroturf” movement in anger over paying taxes, one might find it ironic that the Progressive movement that spawned the income tax came about in very similar times to these: a Gilded age where government had too little regulation over how businesses conduct themselves, much at the expense of the larger populace. Personally, I don’t mind paying my share of taxes, given a reasonable modicum of fairness.